July 20, 2014
There was no point in delaying any further. I waited until everyone else in the house was asleep, then put on the least pajama-y looking pajamas I owned as well as the slippers with the thickest heels.
Then I went into the little bathroom and used a razor blade and a safety pin (sterilized in peroxide, don’t worry) to make two marks in my throat. The process was painful and not particularly convincing, but blood from my leg (hence the need for a razor blade) helped add verisimilitude. I trusted panic to cover the rest.
Then I got a meat tenderizer from the kitchen and used it to shatter the glass of the window in my bedroom.
The house alarm bleated loudly, and I stashed the tenderizer under my pillow, thinking of all the reasons why this wouldn’t work. But then Keith rushed in. Diane was beside him, yelling.
“It bit me!” I screamed as loudly as any actor playing to the cheap seats.
“Is it gone?” Keith demanded, looking around the room as though there might be a vampire hiding behind my shower curtain.
“I don’t know!” I shouted, because more confusion is better. I turned toward Diane. “The kids! You have to keep them away from me. They can’t see me like this.”
She must have realized that they would eventually come down the stairs. Already, the twins cried out for her, demanding to know what they’d heard. Their voices alone probably would have propelled her into the hall, but I like to think that what I saidhelped. Diane turned back to Keith in the doorway. “Cover the window with something. Nail up some wood.”
As soon as she was out of the room, I took my chance. “I can’t stay here,” I told Keith, grabbing my dead phone off the nightstand. “I need to be away from the family before the hunger hits.”
He hesitated. He was used to doing what Diane said, and he had to know that Diane wouldn’t like it if I was gone.
“I don’t want to hurt the children,” I said, with as much gravitas as I could muster. “I can already feel it coming on.”
My daughter would never have married a particularly strong-willed man. Looking horrified, Keith nodded, went with me to the front door, and punched in the code.
“You’re going to be all right?” he asked, a ridiculous question. If this really were all true, I would definitely not be all right, but he needed absolution.
“Of course. You’re doing the right thing for them—and for me,” I reassured him as I headed toward the road. As soon as the door shut, I hobbled as fast as I was able into some nearby bushes and cut through a yard into the stretch of woods that ran behind the homes. I couldn’t move fast, and it wouldn’t be long before Diane noticed that if a vampire really had broken the glass on the window, the shards would be primarily inside the room instead of outside.
I cut across to another street and stayed off the road as much as possible. Inside brightly lit houses, I occasionally caught a glimpse of neighbors drawing their drapes. Then I heard a siren and veered off into a copse of trees.
A police cruiser stopped. One of the cops—a young woman in uniform—got out, looking up and down the road.
“They don’t die right away,” her partner said from inside thecar. “But they move fast once they do. Let’s come back in the morning.”
“She’s not really infected, the lady said. She’s pretending.”
“Yeah,” the guy inside the car said sarcastically. “A seventy-eight-year-old woman ran out into the night, long past curfew, without her cane, to play a prank on her daughter? Or what, she has dementia but is also a manipulative liar? Either the caller didn’t want to admit to herself that her mother’s infected or she thought we wouldn’t look as hard if we knew. I am going with the second.”
The young cop took one last look down the deserted street, got back in the car, and drove away.
The walk to a nearby gas station was grueling. By the time I got there, I’d managed to clean the blood off my neck using a backyard hose, so at least I didn’t look dangerous. Still, I am sure I looked deranged. The clerk blinked at me from behind bulletproof glass.
“You need me to call someone?” he asked.
“What I need, young man,” I told him, as sternly as a schoolteacher, “is a charger cable and fifteen minutes of grace. Do you think you can give that to me?”
“We’re not really allowed—” he started, but I’d already ripped open the box with the cable inside. He blinked at me balefully as I plugged it into the wall.
As it charged, I got myself painkillers, a new cane, a large coffee, and a Danish. Then I used Venmo to pay for my haul and called myself a Lyft.
“The Dead Last Rest Stop?” the driver asked when I got in, eyebrows raised.
“That’s right,” I told him.
It was a little after three when we got there. Floodlights washed the parking lot in a bright glow beneath a neon sign proclaiming the name of the structure. Despite the late hour, the Dead Last Rest Stop was obviously full of people.
Limping toward the front doors on sore feet, I felt a shocking burst of anger at Nigel for, of all things, not writing plays in which a person like me would ever do anything like what I just did.
